Wednesday, September 27, 2006

I got my first real review for Self Storage, from Publisher's Weekly. When I saw an email from my editor with "first review!" as the subject line, my heart started pounding a million miles a second--I wasn't expecting a review to come in so soon. I am hesitant to post it here because it gives away more of the plot than I would like to share. If I can find a link, I'll post it here so anyone who's curious can take a look. My agent and editor assure me it is a good review (it calls my main character "endearing" and "juicy", which makes me happy) but there is one negative sentence and it's a doozy. It just about knocked the wind out of me. It calls the political musings in the book "unsatisfying and banal." Unsatisfying and banal! Yikes! I think this cut deeply because the political aspect of the book (not to mention my life) is very important to me. Ah well. My agent told me she has a friend who references all his bad reviews when he does readings, and always gets a laugh. So if I say something along the lines of "I'm reading from my politically unsatisfying and banal book" at a reading, you'll know why! It's crazy how those few negative words can burn into the brain while all the lovely ones fade away so quickly!

Salon.com is featuring an essay today written by a first time author struggling with bad first reviews. As my editor assured me, the trade reviewers (PW, Kirus, etc.) tend to be a little cranky. I hope the author of the essay will find some more thoughtful reviews elsewhere--his book sounds wonderful. Plus, I need to keep reminding myself that my PW review is not bad; it just has that one whopper of a sentence!

The sting of that sentence was alleviated greatly by the fact that I received an amazing blurb from Barbara Kingsolver today. Barbara read an early draft of the book and was very honest with me about all of its flaws and all the work I had ahead of me. She said she would only write an endorsement for a book she truly believes in. I'm so delighted that she believes in it now. Here's what she wrote:

"With fluid skill, bold as brass, Gayle Brandeis has revised the "Song of Myself," reconfiguring "self" as an open circle. This is a novel of passion and consequence, identity and accountability. I love the narrator, her children, her wild ride, and this truly American story of getting mad and getting wise."

4 comments:

I agree with Barbara! It's a wonderful book. And don't give a second thought to that review. (Says the author who was just called a bad writer, "a bore," and "no Ann Lamott" by one of the fine, fine anonymous Amazon reviewers. Not that I'm caring about it. In the least. How could I? I'm a bore, after all...)

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About Me

I am the author of Fruitflesh: Seeds of Inspiration for Women Who Write (HarperSanFrancisco), Dictionary Poems (Pudding House Publications), and the novels The Book of Dead Birds (HarperCollins), which won Barbara Kingsolver's Bellwether Prize for Fiction in Support of a Literature of Social Change, Self Storage (Ballantine)and Delta Girls (Ballantine), along with my first novel for young readers, My Life with the Lincolns (Henry Holt). You can visit my website at www.gaylebrandeis.com or email me at gaylebrandeis at gmail.com. I am on the national staff of CODEPINK: Women for Peace and am a founding member of the Women Creating Peace Collective. I live in Riverside, CA, where I am currently serving a two year term as Inlandia Literary Laureate, and am mom to two adult kids and a toddler.